When I came home from work last night I saw this post at Instapundit concerning goodyear tires.
A photo seen circulating on social media shows a slide that was presented during a diversity training showing what’s acceptable and what isn’t acceptable as part of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company’s zero-tolerance policy.
Under acceptable: Black Lives Matter (BLM), Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride.
Listed as unacceptable: Blue Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, MAGA Attire, Political Affiliated Slogans or Material.
Don’t buy GOODYEAR TIRES – They announced a BAN ON MAGA HATS. Get better tires for far less! (This is what the Radical Left Democrats do. Two can play the same game, and we have to start playing it now!).
To say this is bad for the company is an understatement. This is not a niche product like some beer in Seattle that can just restrict it’s customer base., This is a product that are used across the political spectrum, and if you automatically exclude half of the voting population from your customer and offend police departments who buy tires in bulk base you are likely going to have trouble as a national brand.
Even worse now if they back away now you have the twitter mob (which while smaller is louder) on your ass.
There is a big fuss about President Trump being only four points down on Biden in the latest CNN poll just before the Democrat convention.
Does it not occur to anyone that this is deliberate so that they can show a convention “bump” for Joe Biden at the end of the week?
After all, if we presume they are manipulating the polls why would they suddenly stop now?
Was slightly surprised to see Biden hit piece in Politico with a lot of stuff coming from Team Obama.
But the more I thought about it the less it was surprising. Biden is a losing candidate. This stuff coming out now is about Obama being able to say “well yeah I had to be pro-forma for Joe but I thought his nomination was a bad idea.”
This is about being able to make the case that when voters reject Biden they weren’t rejecting Obama’s 3rd term. I think that is the reason why Susan Rice wasn’t the VP pick. If she was on the ticket then it would be the Obama ticket.
I had never heard of Millie Weaver before Sunday Morning. When I heard about her arrest I followed a link and starting watching the shadowgate piece on youtube before I went to work.
When I got home it had been pulled for “hate speech” after over 1 million views. I did some searching and found it elsewhere and watched the rest before I hit the sack, still didn’t see any “hate speech” that Youtube cried.
This thing screams Streisand Effect and the idea that this arrest is over an old fight with her mom a few hours before her documentary was released is not credible.
If you want to see it the link to the video is here.
While I’m not watching any sports I have still been listening to sports radio stations when I am out. On Monday while running errands they were talking about the crashing ratings for the NBA.
It was hilarious to hear the excuses:
People got used to not watching
These games didn’t mean anything
It will change with the playoffs
etc etc etc…
The one thing that was never mentioned was going all in on BLM and social justice. That it was never brought up speaks volumes, apparently stating the obvious is completely VERBOTEN.
Finally the most amazing thing I’ve noticed lately is this entire COVID shutdown business, while designed to hurt Trump, has pretty much been liberal suicide.
Universities, Hollywood, public schools, Broadway, and big liberal cities are all falling apart while a good chunk of the rest of the country seems to be carrying on.
The number of liberal institutions that are crumbling under this is astounding. This deserves a longer post and I’ll likely write one later, but I’ll just note that if your goal was to destroy the infrastructure that supports Democrat memes and messages, I can’t see what you’d do differently
I noticed this at Don Surber’s spot on Sunday and thought it worth bringing up
Proud to be #400 Like. You nailed it, sister! Reactionary does not begin to describe the #TDSafflicted#DonkeyBadgeMedia activists. I don’t know. Cats and laser pointers? Oh, and to be clear, destroying 1500 buildings in Minneapolis is not peaceful protest. It’s a blitzkrieg. pic.twitter.com/TgysdKLiyf
I don’t think the people in the bubble really understand what this is doing to the voters because they dismiss all sources outside of the MSM.
However social media from facebook to twitter to parler to instagram means that these stories and sources get out to folks. They may not live politics but the see it and will act accordingly.
I told you about my liberal nephew in Minneapolis who on January 1st was a nevertrump Democrat who will be, as he put it, “crawling over broken glass in a mask to vote for him in November” after the riots. These people have friends and family all over the country who have been told of these riots.
I think that like John Stewart belatedly trying to rally the left in 2010 late October when the reality of the situation finally dawned on him, the Antifa / media / democrat left along with the Deep staters who have enabled them are going to figure this out at the last minute and realize that they are about to lose.
That’s when, like a rat in a corner they will become panicked and the most dangerous. A Trump victory means
Federal prosecutions of those already arrested will actually happen with a lot more to come.
Investigations actually started will progress from the phony Russia Probe to reviewing tapes of riots
Cities that enabled this stuff knowing they will not be bailed out if they back down will have to actually enforce the laws.
And companies intimidated by the woke mob who helped fund them will decide that they’d better get right with Trump while they still can
And that’s not even mentioning use of RICO statues to go after those folks and foundations that have been funding these riots directly which is going to be fueled by this:
A Supreme Court ruling just stripped Soros’ Open Societies entities abroad of 1A “rights” they were taking advantage of influencing US policy w Soros’ foreign orgs & ops. Now they are deemed foreign, & have no US right to free speech, & activities can be considered threatening pic.twitter.com/HVhpkHQRKg
In short once these folks realize all this is coming I expect one last violent outburst in an attempt to stop it.
It will be bad, very bad. In fact I would be shocked if it didn’t include at least one actual assassination attempt on the President with more to come after he wins both enabled by nevertrumpers still working in government worried about investigation.
I am hoping that I’m wrong about all of this (particularly the last because the violent backlash if it succeeds will be horrible, particularly for the left) but I suggest being ready in case I’m not.
About twelve hours after I finished my DTG post last week about Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s get-tough policy on sunbathers in Chicago at Lake Michigan, Chicago became Detroit. That’s not to say that you can now drive for miles in America’s third-largest city–for now–and see nothing but a few lived-in homes among the vacant lots and abandoned houses. Just as you didn’t encounter that in Detroit after the destructive riots there a few days after the 1967 riots faded away.
The Motor City hit rock bottom in 2013 when it declared bankruptcy.
These things take time. Detroit is turning things around now. But its vacant lots will be there for many years.
“Seventy percent of Chicago’s economic activity takes place in and around downtown,” Mike Flannery said last night on his Flannery Fired Up program on Fox Chicago, “and it’s in more peril now than ever before.”
And that’s where the looting, likely directed by Antifa, was centered late last Sunday night and early Monday morning–in and around downtown. Flannery called it “Sad, organized-crime looting.”
So the simple story is that economically speaking, the heart of Chicago is the Loop and North Michigan Avenue, the latter has been known as the Magnificent Mile for decades. You kill that and Chicago dies. Welcome to Detroit.
Last Sunday afternoon a 20-year-old Englewood man was shot by Chicago police officers; he has since been charged with first-degree attempted murder. The accused allegedly shot at the police. A rumor spread online–or was it a manufactured lie?–that the cops shot instead shot an unarmed 15-year-old boy in the same impoverished Englewood neighborhood.
Then came the looting later that night.
The coordinated manner of the looting consisted of mobile criminals, a few of them armed, that quickly descended on the Mag Mile. Some of them came with specialized tools such as drills to hasten the break-ins. There were reports of U-Hauls being packed with stolen goods. The thieves were more organized, Flannery remarked, than the 400 police officers dispatched downtown to confront them.
Much like the people of Englewood, the residents of the downtown area–and the business owners–don’t feel safe there. That’s not to say the folks of the South Side–or the even-worse off West Side–don’t deserve to feel safe. They certainly do. Some of that 70-percent-of-Chicago’s-economic-activity makes its way to the city’s poverty-stricken areas. Should they receive more of it? Probably, but that discussion will belong to shoulda-happened-looking-back rants that you’ll find on Reddit soon.
A few days after the most recent round of looting it was reported that Macy’s is considering leaving the glitzy Water Tower Place mall on North Michigan Avenue, or just perhaps they’ll just downsize there. Under the Marshall Field’s name Macy’s was an original tenant of the mall. What of the smaller operations, the family-run retail outlets who have been devastated with two rounds of looting in just over two months? When they leave, because they don’t have the big names, it won’t make big news. But when Chicago’s downtown area is dominated by boarded up store-fronts with signs declaring “Move in now–lease rates reduced again–first month free!” you’ll know the downtown descent is well under way.
As for the residents of the Loop, the Gold Coast, Lincoln Park, and Lakeview, unlike those people in Englewood, they can afford to move and swallow selling their homes at a loss. A lot of them will. “Why should I stay here?” many will wonder, “there is so much crime, there are no good restaurants here, and there are no decent places to shop.”
You don’t believe me? Here’s what Alderman Brian Hopkins (2nd), a Lightfoot opponent, said on that same Flannery Fired Up show. He decried “the economic devastation and the blow to our collective psyche,” as well as “the sense that people have that they can’t live here anymore, their safety is at risk if they try to live here.” Hopkins believes with the right actions Chicago can be saved. Lightfoot certainly knows that she is facing a severe crisis. But I suspect because she is an ideologue she is incapable of instituting meaningful policy changes.
Right now I believe that for Chicago it’s a matter of mitigating its decline and fall. The looting and riots are of course just a symptom. Chicago hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1931 but it’s best-known mayor–and possibly its best-ever–was machine boss Richard J. Daley, who ruled America’s then-second-largest city with an iron fist from 1955 until 1976. He was a New Deal Democrat–with a strong law-and-order bent. But Lori Lightfoot is Chicago’s first leftist mayor. After the spring round of looting and riots she seemed more interested in protecting the rights of protesters than protecting citizens and businesses. Sadly the line between rioters and protesters in 2020 is blurry and that sentiment was expressed by a Black Lives Matter organizer who said last week in front of a Chicago Police station about looting, “That is reparations.”
Yesterday a march on the South Side evolved in a violent confrontation downtown between protesters and the police. Cops were attacked with mace, one police officer was repeatedly struck with a skateboard.
Many accounts of this latest round of looting mentioned that the criminals seemed emboldened. Of course they are.
Chicago has other serious problems. Its municipal pension programs are the worst-funded of any major city. Detroit’s fall was hastened by enacting a commuter and municipal income tax in 1963. Chicago doesn’t have either of those but it has its pension bomb. So does Cook County and the rest of Illinois. Lightfoot, to be fair, didn’t create the Chicago pension crisis. It was Boss Daley’s son, Richard M., another long-serving mayor, who bears most of the responsibility for that disaster.
Welcome to Detroit.
If there is a way out for Chicago, here it is. State law needs to be changed so municipalities and government agencies can declare bankruptcy. This move will in the short-term be painful as pensioners will receive a “haircut” and vendors will end up with ten-cents on the dollar or so for money owed to them. And the federal government needs to allow states to do the same.
Yep, just like Detroit.
I’m not gleeful about such a move. I have friends and relatives who are collecting those pensions. And as a man of the private-sector I don’t like seeing businesses getting short-changed. As a property owner living just five miles from the city limits I might get caught up in the financial tsunami too.
But the money wasn’t there for pensions in Chicago before COVID-19 and the riots. There’s less of it now.
I was born in Chicago and I’ve lived one-third of my life there. This story is tragic.
Agitators in Chicago complain of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” Perhaps. But then again perhaps not. Lightfoot, Foxx, as well as the Cook County president, Toni Preckwinkle, are African-American women. Chicago’s new police chief is a black man, he succeeded another African-American male. The chief judge of the Cook County Circuit Court is a black man too.
Another way to cushion Chicago’s fall is its citizens to vote, regardless of party-affiliation, for leaders who are results-oriented and not ideologues.
